Maricarmen's eviction has brought thousands onto the streets and reignited debate over housing access in Spain. House prices soar, rents keep rising and supply falls short in the most stressed areas.
Images of María del Carmen Abascal, known as Maricarmen, being evicted from her home in Madrid have become the latest symbol of the crisis over access to housing in Spain.
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The 87-year-old had been renting the property for around 70 years. According to the Tenants' Union of Madrid, after a change of ownership the new landlord proposed raising the rent from about 500 euros to 2,650 euros a month, later bringing it down to 1,650 euros.
After several attempts to stop the eviction, Maricarmen was removed from the flat and then taken to hospital. The case triggered protests that quickly spread beyond Madrid.
But the scale of the reaction is hard to grasp if you only look at this one eviction. Maricarmen's case comes at a time when access to housing has become one of the main sources of economic pressure on many Spanish households.
How much have property prices risen in Spain?
Purchase prices are currently growing at double-digit rates. The Housing Price Index of the National Statistics Institute (INE) recorded a 12.2% year-on-year increase in the second quarter of 2026.
Second-hand housing, which makes up most of the Spanish market, rose even more, by 12.9%, while new-build homes were up 7.4%. Compared with the previous quarter alone, prices climbed another 3.4%.
The problem does not only affect people who want to buy. The average asking rent reached 15.1 euros per square metre in August 2026, according to Idealista, 5.8% more than a year earlier. And these rises come on top of increases recorded in recent years.
The result is that housing costs absorb a large share of the income of many households, especially those that rent.
According to INE data, in 2024 28.1% of people renting a home at market rates were spending more than 40% of their disposable income on housing costs. The European Union average was 19.2%.
So the accessibility problem is not simply that homes are more expensive. For a substantial share of tenants, keeping a home consumes a very high proportion of their income.
Why have prices and rents risen so much?
Experts stress that there is no single explanation, but there is a fundamental imbalance behind the current situation: in the places where most people want or need to live, not enough housing is being created to absorb demand.
Spain continues to gain population and create new households, while housing construction remains well below the levels seen before the financial crisis.
The Bank of Spain has repeatedly highlighted the supply shortfall as one of the main sources of pressure on the market, especially in the most dynamic economic areas, where population and employment have grown the most.
This makes an important distinction necessary. Spain does not literally lack homes everywhere. There are municipalities with stagnant populations and empty properties. The problem is where those homes are located.
Pressure is particularly intense in Madrid, Barcelona, the islands, much of the Mediterranean coast and other major urban and tourist centres. An empty home in a town with little economic activity does not solve the shortage of flats in Madrid, Málaga, Barcelona or Palma.
Why does Spain not simply build more homes?
Part of the answer lies in the consequences of the previous housing crisis. Before 2008, Spain experienced a huge construction boom fuelled by cheap credit. When the bubble burst, many developers disappeared, the banking system ran into serious problems and building activity collapsed.
Residential construction later recovered, but it never returned to those levels. This also helps explain why today's market looks very different from the one that preceded the financial crisis. The Bank of Spain notes that the output of new housing remains far more moderate than in previous expansionary cycles, and that the supply shortfall is especially concentrated in certain areas.
On top of that, building homes takes time. Converting land, obtaining planning permission, securing finance and putting up a building can take years. The housing supply therefore reacts slowly when a city's population grows quickly. And that slow response has consequences for prices.
If tens of thousands of people need additional housing in a particular area but the housing stock hardly increases, competition for the existing properties intensifies.
What role do investment funds and large landlords play?
The ownership of rental housing is also more concentrated than the familiar picture of a small landlord with a single flat to let might suggest.
According to a report drawn up by the Ministry of Consumer Affairs in collaboration with the CSIC, only 39% of regular rental homes are owned by individuals who have a single property for rent. The remaining 61% is held by individual multi-landlords (owners with two or more rental homes), legal entities, including companies and funds, and public bodies.
The same concentration can be seen if we look only at individual owners. 52.8% of the homes rented out by natural persons belong to landlords who own two or more rental properties.
The phenomenon is particularly visible in some of the cities where housing prices are highest. Among homes rented out by individuals, those owned by multi-landlords account for 60.8% in Barcelona, 56.4% in Madrid and 55% in Valencia.
In addition, the stock held by multi-landlords has grown more quickly. Between 2016 and 2023, homes rented out by individuals with two or more properties increased by 39.9%, compared with 30.4% among owners with a single rented home.
But who owns the homes is only one part of the equation. The other is how many people and households are competing for a supply that is growing more slowly.
What role does population growth play?
Spain is approaching 50 million inhabitants after several years of strong demographic growth, driven mainly by immigration. That growth brings positive economic effects: it increases the labour force, consumption and the number of workers.
But it also raises the need for housing. Moreover, to understand the housing market, both the number of inhabitants and the number of households matter. A couple who separate and then need two homes, young people leaving the parental home or workers moving to another city all create new households even if the total population barely changes.
When the number of households grows faster than the available housing stock, competition for homes increases. This is particularly evident in major employment centres such as Madrid, where new residents, workers, students, families and young people seeking independence compete for a limited supply.
What about foreign buyers and holiday rentals?
Both factors have an impact, but their weight varies enormously depending on the place. Holiday rentals can reduce the supply available for long-term residential leases in neighbourhoods with strong visitor demand, especially in big cities, on the islands and in some coastal destinations.
International demand also carries considerable weight in the sales market. According to the College of Registrars, foreign buyers accounted for 15.98% of home purchases in Spain in the second quarter of 2026, the highest share recorded to date. Their presence is particularly strong in the Balearic Islands, where they represented 32.27% of transactions, and in the Valencian Community, with 31.03%.
However, talking about "foreign buyers" covers very different realities. The nationalities most present in the Spanish market as a whole remain mainly European and Moroccan. Data from the Registrars for 2025 placed British, German, Dutch, Moroccan, Romanian, French and Italian nationals among the main foreign buyer groups.
Latin American demand is also present, although its weight is smaller than that of European demand. According to the College of Registrars, buyers from South America made up 5% of purchases by foreigners in the first quarter of 2025. Their presence may also be more significant in certain local markets.
The small stock of social housing
There is another important feature of the Spanish market: the stock of social rental housing is very small compared with other European countries.
According to the Bank of Spain, in 2023 there were around 300,000 social rental homes, equivalent to 1.5% of main dwellings, while the average across European economies was about 7% of the housing stock.
This means that a larger share of low and middle-income households depend directly on the private market. In countries with a broader stock of social housing, more of the population can access rents whose price does not depend solely on market conditions.
In Spain, when private rents rise quickly, there is only a relatively small public stock capable of absorbing households that can no longer afford them.
Young people show another side of the problem
One of the clearest indicators of the difficulties in accessing housing lies, paradoxically, outside the housing market itself: many young people simply never manage to enter it. In 2025, 44.3% of Spaniards aged between 26 and 34 were still living with their parents, one of the highest shares in Europe.
Among them, almost half (47.3%) said their main reason was that they could not afford to buy or rent a home. And among people of all ages who had looked for another home but ultimately not moved, almost seven in ten cited excessive prices as the main obstacle.
This helps explain why the housing debate affects very different generations. Young people struggle to move out. Tenants face high rents. Families compete for larger homes. And some older tenants can find themselves in vulnerable situations when the ownership or the contractual conditions of their homes change.
Why has Maricarmen's case triggered so much mobilisation?
Maricarmen's story brings many of these tensions together in a single case. She is not a young person trying to get into the housing market for the first time, but an 87-year-old woman who had spent roughly seven decades living in the same home.
Her eviction has therefore thrown a spotlight on another dimension of the housing crisis: housing insecurity does not only affect people looking for a flat or trying to move out of the family home, but also people who have been renting for decades when the ownership or the terms of their contracts change.
The specific circumstances of the case have also sparked a political dispute. The central government, the Madrid regional administration, the city council, the landlord and tenants' organisations have disagreed over where responsibility lies and over what measures could have been taken to prevent the eviction.
Amnesty International has argued that evicting Maricarmen without providing her with an adequate housing alternative violated her rights, while the different authorities have blamed one another for what happened.
But the protests have gone beyond Maricarmen's individual case. Her eviction has taken place at a time when buying a home is becoming ever more expensive, rents continue to rise and a significant share of households struggle to cope with these costs.
The demonstrations have turned an individual case into a symbol of a collective problem. Maricarmen's circumstances are exceptional, as few people spend seven decades in the same rented home, but the wider context in which her eviction has taken place is not.